Chapter Text
Oh, I’ve got it baaaaaad, Akarsha realized, as she set to tossing and turning yet again. It was the middle of the night, with the moon hanging low in the sky outside her window, and Akarsha could not sleep a wink. Eventually she settled once more onto her back, staring up absentmindedly at the poster hanging taped above her on the bedroom ceiling. An anime boy with long black hair returned her stare from the oversized piece of laminated paper, but when she squinted her eyes halfway closed, Akarsha could almost trick herself into pretending she was staring at Noelle instead.
It had been a few weeks since she had tried, for the second time, to reveal her feelings for the other girl, as the two of them sat together at the school’s multicultural festival, but somewhat surprisingly for her, nothing had yet come of it. Akarsha had expected that Noelle would either let her down gently, or tell her that she reciprocated her feelings, but slowly, day by day, she had come to realize that Noelle seemingly had no intention of doing either of those things. In fact, it appeared to Akarsha that Noelle had simply decided to just go on being good friends with Akarsha as if nothing had happened at all. Was that even allowed?
Akarsha rolled over again, pressing her face down into her pillow. She mumbled into the fabric of the pillowcase, her words coming out rather muffled. "Maybe she didn’t even know what I was talking about???” That didn’t seem possible, given how anal Noelle was. Akarsha couldn’t imagine Noelle ever forgetting a message like the one she’d sent confessing her feelings. But the alternative, that Noelle did remember and was just choosing not to acknowledge it, also seemed impossible. Noelle might not be great with her own emotions but still, she wasn’t the kind of person to just ignore a friend's feelings like that either.
Akarsha flopped once more onto her back, taking a deep breath. Then she sighed loudly into the stillness of her bedroom. After a couple of seconds, the sigh shifted, quietly becoming Noelle’s whispered name instead.
Yep, she had it very, very bad indeed.
Every time Akarsha closed her eyes, Noelle’s beautiful face seemed to swim before her, and every time she opened them, she found that whatever she looked at reminded her of her favorite French nerd. The anime boy on her ceiling became Noelle, looking prettily down at Akarsha with her hair down around her shoulders for once. Her phone on her bedside table became the mental image of Noelle’s contact info, along with a blurry picture she’d taken of Noelle as she scolded her for something, even while she was trying to keep herself from laughing. Akarsha’s notebook on her desk became thoughts of the notes she’d taken earlier that morning, complete with little doodles she’d drawn in the margins of chibi versions of her and Noelle, holding hands, with dozens of little hearts all around them.
Akarsha's mind drifted back, as she remembered during that class, when Noelle had turned around in her seat and noticed her scribbling away, she almost had a heart attack, and slammed her notebook closed so ferociously that several other students around them had turned to stare at her as well. Noelle’s own eyes had widened, her eyebrows rising curiously.
“What did you do that for?” Noelle had whispered to Akarsha, her interest causing her to break the personal rule she had about not talking during class.
Akarsha had blushed, spluttering for only a moment before she managed to hiss out the lie, “I don’t want you cheating off my notes!” Noelle’s eyebrows went even higher.
“I think we both know that I don’t need to do that,” she had replied, smiling a thin and self-satisfied smile. Akarsha had been terribly frustrated to realize that she found even Noelle’s extremely smug tone of voice somehow endearing. How annoying it was to be in love.
Eventually Noelle had given up her inquisitive staring and turned back around in her seat to face the front of the room again. Akarsha had been too nervous to re-open her notebook after almost being caught red-handed drawing lovesick doodles in her margins, so she set to staring listlessly around the room for a minute or two instead, until she had the completely meaningless and totally platonic idea to give Noelle’s braid a little flick. After steeling herself for a few harrowing moments, she managed to get herself to reach up and do so, causing Noelle’s long length of dark hair to swing back and forth behind her head. Noelle’s entire body had stiffened slightly against her seat, but she did not turn around, and after a while she seemed to relax again.
Akarsha had grinned, finding herself inordinately happy for some unknowable reason, as she watched Noelle’s braid swaying from side to side. When its motion started to slow to a stop, she reached up and gave the braid another flick. Again, the rope of tightly bound hair sailed through the air, but somewhat surprisingly Noelle made no move to stop it this time either. Perhaps she had simply decided it wouldn’t be worth the effort necessary to make Akarsha stop.
Or maybe, Akarsha had thought suddenly, her eyes widening and her cheeks darkening when she stopped and considered it, maybe she’s enjoying the attention I’m giving her?
For a short while she had allowed her mind to take this new notion and run totally wild with it, before managing to give her head a little shake as she cast aside such a foolish thought. Even so, she continued flicking Noelle’s braid every few seconds, and Noelle continued letting her, until suddenly, completely unbeknownst to either of them, their teacher materialized directly behind them.
“I would kindly appreciate it if the two of you would stop flirting in my class,” she had said, loudly, startling Noelle and Akarsha so badly that both of them jolted a couple of inches straight up out of their seats, while the entire rest of the class turned around to stare at them. Their teacher took a step forward, so she was standing right next to Akarsha’s desk. Akarsha looked straight up at her, blushing profusely and feeling like she was about to die, while Noelle turned around in her seat, already blubbering excuses.
“But, but, but ma’am!” she said, practically flailing her arms in an almost instinctual attempt to distance herself from even a minor rebuke from a teacher. “I wasn’t doing anything!”
“I don’t want to hear it,” their teacher had replied, unmoved, shaking her head disapprovingly. “You’re supposed to be focused on silent note-taking right now, not on having your hair played with.”
After that it had been Noelle’s turn to blush, her cheeks turning a deep ruby-red, before she craned around even further in her seat to glare daggers at Akarsha. Akarsha wanted to fade away in that exact moment, to blow like dust into the wind and never think another thought again.
Even when class had ended, and the rest of the students had filed out of the room, snickering behind their hands as they glanced repeatedly at Akarsha and Noelle, her beloved Frenchman had completely refused to speak with her for the rest of the day. Noelle even went so far as to sit with her back facing Akarsha during all of lunch. Akarsha hadn’t minded too much though, as by that time she was already feeling pretty much back to normal. Spending so much time being the class clown had helped her build up quite the tolerance for embarrassment, which had allowed her to rebound from the entire incident rather quickly. And besides, Noelle was extremely cute when she was angry.
Still, Akarsha had missed the sound of her voice for the rest of the afternoon.
Much, much later, back in her darkened bedroom, Akarsha tore her eyes away from her notebook full of doodles that had started all the trouble. After a moment, they found their way over to her silver cell phone sitting on her bedside table instead.
If she really missed Noelle’s voice that badly, she could always give her a call...
Akarsha spent another few minutes tossing and turning, before all at once her hand shot out from under the blankets and grabbed tight to her cell. After a second she flipped it open, her face suddenly illuminated with artificial light. She winced, and squinted into the bright glow of her phone’s screen as she thumbed through her speed dial, hitting directional buttons to scroll past her mother, and her father, and then her older sister Shana, until she saw Noelle’s name shining through the darkness at her. The tiny, pixelated picture of Noelle’s scowling face seemed to beckon wordlessly to her, and before she even realized what she was doing, she found her thumb drifting over to, and hitting, the call button.
The very next instant regret washed over her, as though she were sinking into an icy bath, and she hurried to move her thumb an inch to the right to hit the end call button. But in her extreme haste the nerve signals shooting down from her brain to her hand got all screwed up, and she ended up accidentally dropping the phone directly onto her face instead. As she gave a yelp of surprise and dismay, the only consolation she could find in her flailing mind was the knowledge that surely Noelle was fast asleep at this exact moment, and that she must be the kind of person who switched her phone to silent at night, so there was no real risk of her actually answering.
But as she picked up the cell phone from where it had bounced onto her bed after falling onto face, Akarsha realized with a jolt of pure adrenaline that the little vibrating phone symbol on the screen of her cell phone, the one that meant that the phone on the other end of the call was currently ringing, had changed to a solid green phone symbol, the one that meant that the call had connected.
Tentatively, as if she were holding a stick of dynamite that could inexplicably talk, Akarsha brought her cell phone up to her ear.
“Akarsha, are you there?” came Noelle’s very sleepy voice, from directly out of the end of Akarsha cell phone. For the first time in her life, Akarsha found herself truly marveling at the wonders of technology, at how, almost like magic, the voice of her crush could come sailing across the midnight sky and into her very bedroom.
“Akarsha?” Noelle repeated, her tone becoming slightly less sleepy and slightly more concerned. “Is everything alright, are you okay?”
“Uhhhhhhhhhhhh,” said Akarsha, who was still so surprised that Noelle had actually answered that she couldn’t think of a single thing to say. Eventually she found that she’d been saying Uhhhhh for so long that her brain seemingly defaulted to some previously prepared bit, one so inexplicable and random that even she herself hadn’t known she’d previously prepared it.
“Umm, hi there, Sara!” Akarsha said suddenly, her voice shifting into a sickly, falsely-cheery falsetto, “long time listener, first time caller, I can’t believe I’m actually on the show!”
There was silence on the other end of the call, and Akarsha could almost feel Noelle, miles and miles away, making an extremely annoyed face into her telephone. “Akarsha?” she said finally, her voice completely dead. “Please tell me you didn’t wake me up in the middle of the night for a bit.”
“No way Sara!” Akarsha insisted, completely ignoring Noelle’s defeated tone. She found herself smirking, almost completely unconsciously, into her cellphone’s receiver. “I assure you this is no bit, I’ve got a real relationship pickle on my hands! You see Sara, I’m-”
“My name is NOELLE!” Noelle hissed into her phone. “Who the hell is this Sara person?!”
Akarsha could barely contain her laughter. “Wait a minute???" she managed to say between giggles. "Do you mean to tell me that I’m not currently calling in to Charming Sara’s All Night Radio for Lonely Lovers?” Akarsha's grin grew even wider. “But I could have sworn I wrote down the toll-free number correctly...”
There was more silence from Noelle’s end of the call, and Akarsha suddenly found that, unlike with her in-person bits, not being able to actually see Noelle’s reactions ever-so-slightly diminished her enjoyment of making jokes. A silent, dead phone line just wasn’t the same as a quiet eye roll, and an annoyed shake of the head. Her smile faltered.
Finally Noelle spoke again. “Are you done?”
“Yeah, I guess so,” Akarsha sighed, admitting defeat. “It was a pretty good bit though, right?”
“I suppose,” Noelle conceded begrudgingly, and Akarsha allowed herself another smaller, satisfied smile.
The sound of a very loud, very Un-Noelle-like yawn came through the telephone, which Akarsha found extremely cute. “I can’t believe we’re really talking right now,” Noelle muttered sleepily. “Did you really wake me up at almost one in the morning for a dumb joke?”
“Umm, no, I was, uhh...”Akarsha’s mind fumbled for a lie, and came up empty. “I was actually staring at your contact in my phone and halfway accidentally hit the call button,” she confessed, surprising even herself with her candor.
Yet again there was silence on the other end of the call, and this time Akarsha found herself growing hot and sweaty beneath her blankets. “Oh,” she heard Noelle say quietly after several long seconds had passed.
“I just, I mean, I was only-” Akarsha began to splutter, desperate for an excuse to make her previous statement less of a direct admission of longing. “I was just thinking, that I wanted to, uh, to say I was sorry that I got us in trouble with the teacher today,” she managed to finish, before sighing with relief. That happened to be the truth, and it wasn’t actually all that embarrassing.
Noelle hesitated before she responded. “You... don’t have to apologize,” she allowed quietly, “it’s not as if I wasn’t, um, enjoying your attention.” Akarsha’s eyes practically doubled in size when she heard that, and they stayed that way as Noelle continued. “I’m sorry I refused to talk to you afterwards, I was being silly.”
“Yeah, you really were,” Akarsha agreed. Her room was somehow still dark even though she felt like she must be glowing. She’d have had an entirely new spring in her step after hearing what Noelle had just said, if she were actually stepping anywhere, instead of just laying down in her bed. “You were being a real silly goose. Total silly goose hours over there from you.”
Once more, there was complete and total silence from Noelle’s side of the call. Despite feeling great only a moment ago, Akarsha’s mind was able to fill the quiet with all of her anxieties. Ugh, I should NOT have said that, she thought to herself. Cringe Akarsha is cringe.
She was on the point of trying to change the subject away to something, to anything less stupid and embarrassing than what she had just regrettably uttered, when Noelle spoke again. “It’s strange,” she said slowly, “talking to you over the phone like this.”
Akarsha felt herself get cold all over as her stomach dropped a foot straight down. “Strange like... bad?”
There were immediate sounds of incoherent panic from the other end of the line. “No!” Noelle said hurriedly, “no no no! Not bad!” Akarsha was still confused, but she did feel slightly reassured, so she waited patiently for another few moments, for Noelle to finish collecting her thoughts and continue. “It’s just that, when we’re hanging out in person, sometimes you say things out loud that are stupid or goofy... and I, um-” She paused once more, as if deciding whether or not she should continue. Eventually she seemed to decide to go through with it. “Well, I try to act like I’m annoyed, or aggravated, only really... I actually think you’re being funny...”
Akarsha rode her emotional roller coaster straight up out of her anxiety and back into euphoria yet again as Noelle continued speaking quietly. “Anyway, when that happens, I try to smile, even just a little bit... I guess so that you might know that I’m actually having a good time, even though I’m pretending not to.” Noelle was silent once more, but Akarsha didn’t dare speak, in case Noelle had any more nice things to say about her. “And so right now,” Noelle went on, seemingly about ready to finish her little impromptu speech, “I think when we’re talking over the phone, I feel strange because there’s no way for you to see me after you say something silly... for you to know that I’m really smiling. Does... does that make any sense?”
Akarsha was very silently, and very entirely, freaking out. Her whole body was vibrating. “I mean,” she began slowly, her heart hammering in her chest, her lips pressed breathlessly to the receiver. “You could always just... tell me, whenever you’re smiling...”
There was that familiar silence on the line for several long, drawn-out seconds, during which Akarsha could only hear the frantic beating of her own heart, before Noelle suddenly spoke in a voice so tremulous and sweet that Akarsha could have sworn she'd scientifically developed her intonation in a audio laboratory to be perfectly suited to rendering Akarsha a complete and total emotional wreck.
“I’m smiling right now,” she said.
Akarsha couldn’t breathe, she couldn’t think, so overwhelmed was she with the cuteness of Noelle's quiet, innocuous statement. Moments passed, but Akarsha was reeling too hard to say anything at all.
“Akarsha?” Noelle asked nervously. “Are you still there?”
“I’m here,” Akarsha finally managed to say. “And... and I’m smiling too.”
“Oh,” said Noelle, letting out a small, nervous giggle. “That’s good.” And then, for no particular reason, both of them were laughing into their telephones.
After that, each of them managed to get over themselves long enough to talk normally for a little while longer. The moon rose further in the sky, and somewhere out in the night an owl hooted, but apart from that there were no other sounds beside the whispered conversation of the two teenage girls.
Eventually, Akarsha could no longer prevent herself from yawning into her phone. “Are you finally falling asleep?” Noelle asked pointedly. “We both should be asleep honestly. I can’t believe you woke me up for this, you’re the absolute worst.”
“I’m smiling,” Akarsha said loudly through gritted teeth, willfully ignoring Noelle’s insult.
There was grudging silence from Noelle, until finally she said, “I’m smiling too...”
Akarsha relaxed her jaw and then yawned again, content. “Will you sing me a lullaby?” she asked Noelle, speaking through the yawn.
“No,” Noelle replied flatly. “I don’t sing.”
“I suppose it doesn’t have to be a song,” Akarsha allowed, mulling over her options. “You could just tell me a bedtime story, or even read to me from your class notes. I just want to fall asleep to the sound of your voice.”
For what felt like the twentieth time that night, there was silence from Noelle over the phone. “Noelle, are you smiling?” Akarsha asked tentatively.
“...yes,” Noelle confessed under her breath.
Akarsha's cheeks turned pink. “Me too,” she said. “Now read me your bedtime notes!”
“Fineeeee,” Noelle seethed in obvious mock-annoyance, and after a few seconds Akarsha could hear through the phone the sound of her rummaging around. “You know,” Noelle said, as she flipped audibly through the pages of her notebook, “I don’t know why I should share my notes with you, when you wouldn’t share whatever was in your notebook with me earlier today." She cleared her throat noisily. "Hmmm?”
Akarsha couldn’t help hesitating. “Maybe one day... I’ll show you what’s in there,” she managed to say.
Noelle sighed. “I suppose that will have to do,” she said. And then, slowly and quietly, she began to read aloud to Akarsha from her history notes. It was almost impressive how she could make ancient wars, in which countless people had really fought and really died, sound completely and totally boring. But it was even more impressive to Akarsha just how beautiful her voice could sound as she did it.
Akarsha placed her phone on her pillow, directly beside her ear, and closed her eyes. Almost immediately, she began to drift off to sleep, and within three minutes, she was unconscious.